Results tagged “Social media” from IABlog

A whopping 70 percent of marketers say they are planning to increase their social media advertising budget in 2015, according to the recent Salesforce 2015 State of Marketing Survey of 5,000+ global marketers. Yet, as social media platforms incorporate new paid advertising options to replace older ones, it is increasingly difficult for agencies and marketers to navigate the available ad products in the paid social media world.

To help make sense of this rapidly evolving space, the IAB Social Media Committee worked with the top seven social media platforms to develop a “one stop shopping” guide that provides the industry with an up-to-date framework for buying advertising on Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr and Twitter.

“In a world that moves fast, relying on resources such as the IAB Social Media Guide provides tremendous value to marketers, giving them true insight into the social media landscape. But the real value comes from marketing partners for each social platform who can us this guide as a reference to better evaluate all the amazing options at their disposal to reach the right audience, the right way, at the right time in the purchase funnel. This guide is an evolving working document, as evolving as our industry is,” said IAB Social Media Committee Co-chair Carine Roman, Head of Global Advertising Operations at LinkedIn. Readers can use the interactive guide to focus on the platforms they are most interested in.

Fellow Co-chair Christine Cuoco, Director of Global Business Marketing at Twitter added, “Our hope is that this collaboration inspires creativity, innovation and high quality work.”

What do the social media platform contributors have to say about the guide?

The Social Media Buyer’s Guide is a great resource that helps marketers and agencies understand how they can drive real, business results across some of the largest and most engaging publishers in the world. It’s great to see that all partners came together to create one valuable resource. For more information about advertising on Facebook and Instagram, please visit: https://www.facebook.com/business/resources and http://business.instagram.com/

- Judy Lee, Head of Industry Marketing at Facebook

This comprehensive guide provides a helpful top-line view of paid social media vehicles, as well as the current capabilities and ideal uses for each platform. Our belief is that as advertisers harness the intrinsic value in social and location-based platforms, the IAB Social Media Guide will prove to be a useful tool for laying groundwork for client use cases and campaign expectations.

- Swen Graham, Director, Creative and Brand Strategy at Foursquare

This one-stop resource guide is a solid framework for getting started with marketing your brand across leading social media platforms. An amazing collaborative approach to social media creating an aggregated guide needed to up level your social marketing efforts. For more information and to get started with LinkedIn products, please visit https://business.linkedin.com/ or contact your LinkedIn Account Executive.

While these platforms are often lumped together as “social” there are important distinctions that make them unique. For example, Pinterest does connect people, but at its core, it’s a visual bookmarking tool that’s most often used to help people plan their lives. This guide is a helpful reference to help you plan your approach to make the most of each platform. For more information about Pinterest Tools, please visit https://business.pinterest.com.

- Yolanda Lam, Agency Partnerships at Pinterest

This collective guide is a tremendous and reliable resource for marketers looking to elevate their brand presence and captivate new audiences across the ever-evolving social landscape. For more information on getting started with Tumblr, please visit Tumblr.com/business or contact [email protected].

This guide is a powerful resource for any marketer who wants to stay up to date on best practices across multiple ad platforms. Access additional resources and marketer success stories at https://biz.twitter.com/success-stories, and reach out to your account lead with any questions.

It is intended that the Social Media Buyer’s Guide will be updated as major ad product changes are announced by any of the seven platforms, so please check back frequently to get the most up-to-date ad product information.

If you have any questions, or would like to be considered for inclusion in this guide, please email Susan Borst - [email protected]

About the Author

Susan Borst

Susan Borst is the Director, Industry Initiatives at the IAB focusing on Social Media, B2B, Games, Content Marketing and Native Advertising. She can be reached on Twitter @susanborst

Recently, I had the privilege of moderating the CPG panel during the IAB Social Media Agency Day. The title of the event was a bit paradoxical; “Social: Planning for Real Time”, but given that marketers are dedicating more and more of their budgets toward social media, they are increasingly leaning on their agency partners to do something that they haven’t traditionally been asked to do, namely plan for the unexpected. The recent “poster child” for a brand that did this successfully is, of course, Oreos during Super Bowl XLVII (which was jokingly referred to during the event as “Lord Voldemort” i.e. the campaign which shall not be named—precisely because everyone has been talking about it.) Organized by the IAB’s Social Media Committee, this event discussed real time social media planning by different verticals: CPG, Travel, Auto and Sports. “By featuring different categories, we were able to show a great range of real time social media examples”, said IAB committee liaison, Susan Borst, adding, “You don’t have to be a Super Bowl advertiser to have real time social media impact.”

Our conversation ranged from the Oscars to the tragedy in Newtown and highlighted key insights that CPG/Food brands and their agencies need to keep in mind as they strive to engage with consumers in ways that are both meaningful to them—after all, they wield the power today, don’t they?—and true to the brand promise.

Phil Ripperger:What does real time mean to you and how does social media fit into the equation?

Emily Culp: Humans are real time, and brands need to be more and more humanized (by the very humans who create them!). This doesn’t mean jumping up in every possible moment. It means, just like a human, that brands should add value in relevant moments.

What is a relevant moment? How do you know as a human? You can feel it. Brands need to be listening, asking questions, and engaging with their consumers in a way that adds value and allows them to feel when topical content or value is right.

As marketers, we go to school to learn classical marketing (5Ps) and then spend the weekend acting as a consumer might. Those two things need to come together, with the rise of mobile. Getting out of campaign mindsets and living and breathing each day is the real value of real time.

How do we do that? It means we need a team full of smart, innovative, pioneering marketing minds and the support of legal, comms, and the executives to support something that might not feel quite as comfortable but will resonate with our consumers & sell more units.

Dina Freeman: At BabyCenter, being prepared for real time means more than pushing stuff out during big events like the Oscars or Super Bowl. Every day, moms in the BabyCenter Community are talking to other moms with similar due dates or children who are the same age, asking for advice and product recommendations. Our Talk Tracker tool can pinpoint when these conversations are happening down to the exact week of pregnancy or a child’s life. This represents an enormous opportunity for brands who want to reach moms at the exact time that they are making decisions about that product or service. That’s as real time as it gets.

GG:Real time is creating and distributing content that is consumed right at that moment about topics that are relevant to a specific time period. Examples - talking about the Oscars DURING the TV broadcast or covering fashion week in NY as it’s happening. The content loses its relevance after a very short period of time. Social is the absolute perfect place to distribute real time content. People are checking it all times, it is interactive, it is short form, and it is highly mobile.

PR:Why is it important that we’re talking about it and what are some examples of how it’s being done right?

DF:When we dissect new trends until we’re all sick of hearing about them, we move the industry forward. As much as people are tired of hearing about the OREO moment, it was monumental in bringing real time social to the surface. It forced brands to pay attention and create a strategy.

One important question for brands to ask is when shouldn’t we be engaging in real time social? When national tragedies hit, like the Boston Marathon bombing or Newtown, it’s wise for brands to immediately take the temperature of their fans and be prepared to remove all posts in all social networks if necessary. We learned this during the Newtown tragedy back in December. When the news hit, we were in shock along with the rest of the nation. While grappling with the senselessness, we forgot to pull our pre-programmed posts, including a celebrity-focused Facebook post that was not right for that moment. Our moms instantly let us know that this was not appropriate and we agreed with them apologizing for the oversight. We then decided to pull all posts for a couple of days because, frankly, nothing seemed right to us either. All of that to say, it’s as important to be prepared and have a checklist for those real time moments when silence is golden.

GG: Because real time / social content is driving consumption on mobile and everyone has smart phones and are using them as content consumption devices on top of communication devices. Brands that take advantage of real world events are doing it well - obviously Oreo cookies but brands like Burberry do an amazing job covering fashion week (both their own brands and other brands) and L’Oreal does a good job having events during the Golden Globes and Grammys.

EC:Social moves units. It gives us context for consumers. It drives them to specific retail locations. And more than anything, it builds a deeper relationship with a brand they actually want to talk to.

At Unilever, we want the best idea to win and fast. So that means we can’t just rely on marketing models with historic data & react solely to that. We’re passionate about our consumers, bringing them closer to us and making the brand a part of their lives is far more interesting.

This is about pre-work, it’s about having your entire team and your agencies working together before that real time moment (whether it’s the Super Bowl or a Monday afternoon that matters in your community). Just as we used to plan ahead for crisis, we should plan ahead for positive moments where a brand can add value.

PR:Now to put my market researchers hat on and ask my favorite question about social media: How do you know if it’s successful—how do you measure it?

GG:If lots of people are consuming the content. If the content is being syndicated on Twitter by both the brand’s account and on tons of influencer accounts, it will be viewed by lots of people. An even better testament is the engagement. If people start sharing and commenting on the content it is even better. Measuring hard metrics like Post views on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, pins on Pinterest etc. are a good start.

EC:We played with content during the Grammys to understand what we would do during the Oscars on Dove. This is about testing and learning. What matters is that our engagement numbers on those pieces of content go up compared to a normal day.

D.F.:Measurement really depends on the platform, but overall, we measure success by the level of engagement. We look at Social Actions, which is any action taken on a post regardless of platform. Comments, likes, shares, photo views, photo submissions, pins/repins, clicks … the list goes on and on. Our clients are also interested in Social Impressions, or the number of times a post is displayed on Facebook and Twitter.

This is the second in the blog series that provides an overview of discussions from the April 3, 2013 “Social - Planning for Real Time” Agency Day including ways that Travel, CPG/Food, Sports, and Auto have planned social for real time to make their marketing dollars work harder, and is also a part of IAB Social Media Committee member initiatives focusing on the intersection of Social with Paid, Owned, and Earned Media Best Practices.

About the Author

Phil Ripperger

Phil Ripperger is Vice President, New Media Solutions at IRI. Phil focuses on driving partnerships with Tier 1 publishers, ad networks, and digital media research companies to create breakthrough solutions for CPG and retail companies. He is a member of the IAB Social Media Committee and on Twitter at @RipperP.

Recently, I had the privilege of moderating the CPG panel during the IAB Social Media Agency Day. The title of the event was a bit paradoxical; “Social: Planning for Real Time”, but given that marketers are dedicating more and more of their budgets toward social media, they are increasingly leaning on their agency partners to do something that they haven’t traditionally been asked to do, namely plan for the unexpected. The recent “poster child” for a brand that did this successfully is, of course, Oreos during Super Bowl XLVII (which was jokingly referred to during the event as “Lord Voldemort” i.e. the campaign which shall not be named—precisely because everyone has been talking about it.) Organized by the IAB’s Social Media Committee, this event discussed real time social media planning by different verticals: CPG, Travel, Auto and Sports. “By featuring different categories, we were able to show a great range of real time social media examples”, said IAB committee liaison, Susan Borst, adding, “You don’t have to be a Super Bowl advertiser to have real time social media impact.”

Our conversation ranged from the Oscars to the tragedy in Newtown and highlighted key insights that CPG/Food brands and their agencies need to keep in mind as they strive to engage with consumers in ways that are both meaningful to them—after all, they wield the power today, don’t they?—and true to the brand promise.

Phil Ripperger:What does real time mean to you and how does social media fit into the equation?

Emily Culp: Humans are real time, and brands need to be more and more humanized (by the very humans who create them!). This doesn’t mean jumping up in every possible moment. It means, just like a human, that brands should add value in relevant moments.

What is a relevant moment? How do you know as a human? You can feel it. Brands need to be listening, asking questions, and engaging with their consumers in a way that adds value and allows them to feel when topical content or value is right.

As marketers, we go to school to learn classical marketing (5Ps) and then spend the weekend acting as a consumer might. Those two things need to come together, with the rise of mobile. Getting out of campaign mindsets and living and breathing each day is the real value of real time.

How do we do that? It means we need a team full of smart, innovative, pioneering marketing minds and the support of legal, comms, and the executives to support something that might not feel quite as comfortable but will resonate with our consumers & sell more units.

Dina Freeman: At BabyCenter, being prepared for real time means more than pushing stuff out during big events like the Oscars or Super Bowl. Every day, moms in the BabyCenter Community are talking to other moms with similar due dates or children who are the same age, asking for advice and product recommendations. Our Talk Tracker tool can pinpoint when these conversations are happening down to the exact week of pregnancy or a child’s life. This represents an enormous opportunity for brands who want to reach moms at the exact time that they are making decisions about that product or service. That’s as real time as it gets.

GG:Real time is creating and distributing content that is consumed right at that moment about topics that are relevant to a specific time period. Examples - talking about the Oscars DURING the TV broadcast or covering fashion week in NY as it’s happening. The content loses its relevance after a very short period of time. Social is the absolute perfect place to distribute real time content. People are checking it all times, it is interactive, it is short form, and it is highly mobile.

PR:Why is it important that we’re talking about it and what are some examples of how it’s being done right?

DF:When we dissect new trends until we’re all sick of hearing about them, we move the industry forward. As much as people are tired of hearing about the OREO moment, it was monumental in bringing real time social to the surface. It forced brands to pay attention and create a strategy.

One important question for brands to ask is when shouldn’t we be engaging in real time social? When national tragedies hit, like the Boston Marathon bombing or Newtown, it’s wise for brands to immediately take the temperature of their fans and be prepared to remove all posts in all social networks if necessary. We learned this during the Newtown tragedy back in December. When the news hit, we were in shock along with the rest of the nation. While grappling with the senselessness, we forgot to pull our pre-programmed posts, including a celebrity-focused Facebook post that was not right for that moment. Our moms instantly let us know that this was not appropriate and we agreed with them apologizing for the oversight. We then decided to pull all posts for a couple of days because, frankly, nothing seemed right to us either. All of that to say, it’s as important to be prepared and have a checklist for those real time moments when silence is golden.

GG: Because real time / social content is driving consumption on mobile and everyone has smart phones and are using them as content consumption devices on top of communication devices. Brands that take advantage of real world events are doing it well - obviously Oreo cookies but brands like Burberry do an amazing job covering fashion week (both their own brands and other brands) and L’Oreal does a good job having events during the Golden Globes and Grammys.

EC:Social moves units. It gives us context for consumers. It drives them to specific retail locations. And more than anything, it builds a deeper relationship with a brand they actually want to talk to.

At Unilever, we want the best idea to win and fast. So that means we can’t just rely on marketing models with historic data & react solely to that. We’re passionate about our consumers, bringing them closer to us and making the brand a part of their lives is far more interesting.

This is about pre-work, it’s about having your entire team and your agencies working together before that real time moment (whether it’s the Super Bowl or a Monday afternoon that matters in your community). Just as we used to plan ahead for crisis, we should plan ahead for positive moments where a brand can add value.

PR:Now to put my market researchers hat on and ask my favorite question about social media: How do you know if it’s successful—how do you measure it?

GG:If lots of people are consuming the content. If the content is being syndicated on Twitter by both the brand’s account and on tons of influencer accounts, it will be viewed by lots of people. An even better testament is the engagement. If people start sharing and commenting on the content it is even better. Measuring hard metrics like Post views on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, pins on Pinterest etc. are a good start.

EC:We played with content during the Grammys to understand what we would do during the Oscars on Dove. This is about testing and learning. What matters is that our engagement numbers on those pieces of content go up compared to a normal day.

D.F.:Measurement really depends on the platform, but overall, we measure success by the level of engagement. We look at Social Actions, which is any action taken on a post regardless of platform. Comments, likes, shares, photo views, photo submissions, pins/repins, clicks … the list goes on and on. Our clients are also interested in Social Impressions, or the number of times a post is displayed on Facebook and Twitter.

This is the second in the blog series that provides an overview of discussions from the April 3, 2013 “Social - Planning for Real Time” Agency Day including ways that Travel, CPG/Food, Sports, and Auto have planned social for real time to make their marketing dollars work harder, and is also a part of IAB Social Media Committee member initiatives focusing on the intersection of Social with Paid, Owned, and Earned Media Best Practices.

About the Author

Phil Ripperger

Phil Ripperger is Vice President, New Media Solutions at IRI. Phil focuses on driving partnerships with Tier 1 publishers, ad networks, and digital media research companies to create breakthrough solutions for CPG and retail companies. He is a member of the IAB Social Media Committee and on Twitter at @RipperP.

While it is the year of data, mobile, and the snake, 2013
also continues to revitalize the age-old trend of content marketing and
syndication. It seems these ideas are so old they’re new again.

John Deere has been doing it since 1895 with “The Furrow,”
so what is making content marketing so attractive now to the modern marketer?
While there is no clear cut definition of content marketing, I would put forth
that it is content created by a brand, that even if the branding were removed,
that the content would still be valuable and engaging to a reader. If done
well, it creates positive brand connotation. And if we work with that
definition, it makes sense that the modern marketer (much like the modern
publisher) wants to get the attention of content-ravenous consumers, most of
whom have one or more devices attached to them at any given moment with which
to consume.

Last week, the IAB held a Content Marketing Town Hall to foster a discussion around both the concerns and opportunities publishers have in the content marketing and syndication space. The IAB AdLab was packed to the brim. Publishers came with some fears about brands honing in on the content business. To open the day, Andrew Susman, President & CEO of StudioOne and ICSC Board Chairman, reminded us with calming voice that,“Currently the industry sees branded content as a type of media buy, but actually it’s a type of content. If you bring audience to branded content - you get content marketing.”

Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute, delivered the opening keynote of the day, outlining
the opportunity for publishers and brands to work together to deliver relevant
content to consumers, whether branded or editorial, because, as Jonathan
Perelman, VP Agency Strategy and Industry Development at BuzzFeed later noted, “Great content finds its audience.” So it seems that the name of the game is getting engaging content in
a place where your readers will consume it, whether you’re a publisher
embracing branded content on your site, or you’re looking to syndicate out your
editorial content to brands.

One concern did resound in the room around advertorial
content. Should there be guidelines that clearly denote advertorial content? Do
ethical standards need to be set for branded content and along with it, best
practices on transparency and disclosure? Do we need to create sponsored
content labeling conventions? And especially as automated platforms serve up
content, how can we ensure that we’re seamlessly integrating advertorial
content but not duping readers? The need to ensure will undoubtedly be an ongoing conversation within the IAB, among our membership, and in the industry as a whole.

The IAB Content Marketing Town Hall was held on January 24,
2013. Moderated by Susan Borst, Director, Industry Initiatives, IAB, the following industry leaders
presented at this IAB member-exclusive event:

Amy Hyde, Product Strategy & Business Development R&D
Ventures, New York Times Company

Julie Van Ullen is the Vice President of Member Services at
the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Ms. Van Ullen oversees member
acquisition, participation, and retention programs. In addition, she works with
designated member leaders to develop strategic, market-marking initiatives for
execution within IAB’s Committees and Councils.

“Social Influence” is a hot topic. There is no shortage of opinions on what ‘influence’ actually means and no shortage of companies who seek to analyze influential prospects and customers for business gain. But one thing the industry does seem to agree on is that influencer monitoring and measuring is here to stay as a key component of the paid, owned and earned media equation.

Scott Milener, SVP Social Strategy from Kred, a social media analytics company created by PeopleBrowsr, recently spoke with the IAB Social Media Committee about this topic. “A social influencer is someone who inspires action from others in their community,” Milener said, adding “We’re accustomed to thinking of top influencers as being celebrities or media outlets. Social analytics gives us an opportunity to move beyond that group to find people that have high influence in small close networks connected by interests, passions and affiliations. These people are exponential in value to non-influencers and can have a profound impact on the opinions of their peers and followers.” A top goal is to “achieve virality by getting influencers to organically and virally spread messages or links.” Milener stressed the importance of valuing influencers by “rewarding, incentivizing and treating them as if they were top journalists.” This engagement with influencers drives brand-related conversations.

We followed up with three IAB member companies present at the meeting to see what role social influence plays in their business’ paid, owned and earned media equation, how it is measured and how they see this evolving in the future.

Social Influence is the ability to activate participatory eagerness across one’s social and interest graphs. In the context of social media influence should not solely be defined in terms of conversations and community size, the core tenets of social media, but also in terms of interest based actions which fuel the interest graph. The interest graph is a more powerful mechanism than the social graph when it comes to driving social influence. The influence of the social butterfly is dying. This is because attention is about context. If you want attention you have to provide content that intersects your audience’s path to consumption. In the future, Social Influencers will have more powerful interest graphs than social graphs. Either way, measuring this type of influence in terms of business gain is straightforward, but in order to measure it successfully you must have pre-defined goals. In its most simplified form at Condé Nast, from an acquisition stand point, we are typically measuring referral traffic to our websites, which means Omniture and Google Analytics are predominantly used to measure the success of social influencer programs. In its broadest sense marketing programs have three main pillars: Acquisition, Engagement, and Conversion, and ultimately what to measure and how to measure it depends on your business goals.

At Unruly, our core business is social video distribution and measurement of video sharing across the web. We define social influence not only by the size and precision of a particular influencers’ social graph, but also by the amount of sharing that they drive of our clients’ video content…and by the amount of meaningful conversation around that content that ensues. We also measure the quality of the engagement that these influencers can stimulate including video dwell time, play rates and the volume and tone of subsequent conversation. In Unruly’s view, these are all legitimate criteria for measuring influence. We measure the power of this influence for brands every day. In fact, we published a white paper earlier this year that demonstrates the exponential value of recommendation across social media and how that can translate into ROI for marketers. At Unruly, we see social influence growing in importance for brand marketers over the long haul. The real power of digital media is its ability to facilitate a feedback loop. As marketers grow more comfortable with having an ongoing conversation with their consumers, more and better influencers will emerge. The democratization of the web means that anyone can be a publisher…with the widening and deepening of social platforms, it’s a natural progression that anyone can become an influencer as well!

At Disqus, we strive to create engaging communities and to elevate the quality of discussions. In June we rebuilt our platform specifically to more fully capture and incorporate social influence signals from our large user base (800 million monthly uniques, 300 million monthly active users). For instance, Disqus displays the best comments at the top of the discussion thread based in large part on community voting and user reputation scores. Another example is the social discovery of content via our Discovery box whereby users receive personalized content recommendations based on what they (and users similar to them) have read and engaged with across Disqus-enabled sites. We are also excited about the monetization opportunities around social discovery because it allows advertisers to natively enter the conversation while also being complementary to the user experience. In the future, social influence will take an ever-expanding role in everything we do. Why? Because doing so drives tangible results. For example, traffic that is referred by Disqus social discovery performs much better than other referral sources…on average 2X the page views and 3X the time on site versus other referrers. Our success depends upon capitalizing on the richness of our data, a key component of which is social influence.

This blog series focuses on key areas of interest within the realm of paid, owned and earned media and taps into the expertise of IAB Social Media Committee members to share insights and best practices. What’s your take on social influence? Join in the conversation by commenting here or posting comments and/or questions using #IABPOEM.

About the Author

Susan Borst

Susan Borst is the Director, Industry Initiatives at the IAB focusing on Social Media, B2B and Games. She can be reached on Twitter @susanborst.

At IAB, we listen a lot to our members and the digital industry. We discuss ideas with you at many of our events, too. And we genuinely want to hear from you, to help us move the industry forward.

As social media manager for IAB and the voice of @IAB, I’m always exploring networks, trends, and tools, and creative ways to strengthen relationships, communicate IAB efforts, create engaging content, help tell your stories, and foster a better two-way dialogue between IAB and its membership. One of those great social media tools we often use in those timely conversations is our Facebook page, of which I’m proud to say that the IAB has 13,549 followers as of this writing.

It’s been a big week in digital advertising. As many of you know, we recently released news of a new standard ad unit portfolio at the fifth anniversary of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, an exciting three days among the top thought leaders in digital advertising. Among that portfolio were six IAB Rising Stars Display ad units—new interactive units that enable marketers to tell bigger, bolder brand stories.

Facebook also unveiled its own news yesterday about Facebook Timeline for Brands at its Facebook Marketing Conference (fMC), to help brands tell better stories through their new products such as Timeline for Pages, Mobile Ads and Premium Ads. For those brands that may not have made the switch yet, here’s what some of our members have said about it:

We’re pleased to announce that the IAB has already modified our Facebook Page to Timeline, at www.facebook.com/iab. Check it out as a great resource for IAB history, stories, and news. As we begin to share IAB history with interesting content, connect more with people, and tell better stories, take a look and let us know what you think.

Helping you better build your brand stories digitally is important to IAB. In fact, it’s one of our primary goals for 2012. As Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of IAB, spoke about at our MIXX Conference & Expo in October 2011, such brand innovation in the digital industry will come from storytelling, not simply technology.

Help us continue to build better relationships with you, wherever you are and whatever platforms you use. We want to hear from you!

About the Author

Jeff Fryer

Jeff Fryer is Marketing Manager, IAB, and helps the IAB to better listen, understand, and engage in conversations in social media. You can tweet him @jfryer2000 and follow the IAB on Twitter @IAB.

Recently, I sat down for lunch with John Schneider, Vice President of Sales at Federated Media and my newly appointed co-chair at the IAB Social Media Committee, to prepare for our first meeting today, February 23rd. Our heads are abuzz with new ideas for 2011, so we thought it would be best to tee up our first meeting with a blog post outlining our thoughts in order to really encourage discussion.

The first thought, and this is probably on everyone’s mind, is whether “Social Media” has become too broad of a category. Social Media is really all things… games, mobile, video, etc. I’ve written about this before (See: Accept Everything We Do Is Social (And ‘Like’ It)), the trend of all media becoming social. This being the case, the question we face at the IAB is: how do we encourage collaboration between the Social Media Committee and other IAB Committees - such as the Games, Digital Video, and Mobile Advertising Committees, among others, to move the interactive advertising industry forward? In the long run, does it make sense for the other Committees to roll into the Social Media Committee, should the Social Media Committee break up and become part of the other Committees, or will we be able to maintain a delicate co-existence through clearly defined rules and boundaries? These are questions we don’t know the answers to, yet.

But until then, our roles as the Social Media Committee co-chairs are to make sure we drive forward. We need to get the right companies involved. Some - like Zynga, Twitter, and Groupon - are not, yet, IAB members and need to be recruited, while others are IAB members that need to be engaged in the right ways to ensure their involvement and insights.

As our Committee membership grows, our audience’s interests become more diverse. That means that for any topic we discuss, it will appeal to some participants and not others, and that’s okay - we need to make it easier for members to self-select the discussions and topics that are relevant to them, perhaps on a quarterly basis.

How do we get actionable content to the marketplace quickly and consistently? You shouldn’t have to wait all year long for a white-paper or buyers guide that is out of date by the time the next one comes along. Can we create something digital? What about an agency day or thought pieces produced on a quarterly basis?

We’d love to hear feedback on these questions. The term “Social Media” from an advertising standpoint includes various pillars, such as media, community management and activity, and our role in driving the social marketing landscape is more important than ever. We need to start taking a more fine-grained approach to understanding the social activities taking place on various social mediums, whether on apps, mobile or the Web, and then we need to lay down guidelines for how advertisers can add value. I’d like to end this post with a quote from someone I’ve followed for a long time - Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and formerly of Morgan Stanley, “Advertising,” she says, “… we think it’s ripe for innovation. We’ve been waiting for online advertising to show its stuff for about 15 years.” I couldn’t agree more. Through “social” we have the opportunity to throw out the digital playbook of today and show our “stuff.”

Let’s make 2011 the year.

Chris Cunningham is co-founder and CEO of appssavvy and co-chair of the IAB Social Media Committee. Reach him via email or follow him on Twitter @appssavvyceo.

The paper explains how the platforms have fundamentally shifted the digital experience for consumers and advertisers alike, defines UGC and social media, provides a detailed overview of the latest advertising opportunities, and details case studies of campaigns that have successfully utilized UGC and social media.